Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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The effort by advocates of the medical use of marijuana to link their cause to the Supreme Court's federalism revolution appeared headed for failure at the court on Monday...
(I)llegal drugs are fungible and exist within a national market, Paul D. Clement, the acting solicitor general, told the Supreme Court in arguing the administration's appeal, Ashcroft v. Raich, No. 03-1454. "What we're talking about here is the possession, manufacture and distribution of a valuable commodity for which there is, unfortunately, a ready market," he said.
Mr. Clement asserted that Supreme Court precedents dating to the New Deal made it clear that "the relevant focal point is not the individual plaintiff's activities" but rather the impact on the economy of an entire category of activity, taken as a whole, that Congress has chosen to regulate.
In fact, much of the debate in the courtroom on Monday centered on one particular precedent, Wickard v. Filburn, a decision from 1942 that upheld Congress's effort to support wheat prices by controlling wheat production. The court held that even the wheat that a farmer cultivated for home consumption could be regulated under the Agricultural Adjustment Act's quota system on the theory that all wheat production took place within a national market. That decision is regarded as one of the most far-reaching extensions of Congressional power that the Supreme Court has ever upheld.
Randy E. Barnett, a Boston University Law School professor arguing on behalf of the two women, told the justices on Monday that if they accepted the administration's argument in this case, "then Ashcroft v. Raich will replace Wickard v. Filburn as the most far-reaching example" of Congress's power over interstate commerce. Prohibition of "a class of activity that is noneconomic and wholly intrastate" was not essential to the government's "regulatory regime," he said, adding: "There is no interstate connection whatsoever."
But the justices whom Mr. Barnett needed to persuade, those who have questioned federal authority in recent cases, were skeptical. "It looks like Wickard to me," Justice Antonin Scalia told him, adding: "I always used to laugh at Wickard, but that's what Wickard says." He continued: "Why is this not economic activity? This marijuana that's grown is like wheat. Since it's grown, it doesn't have to be bought elsewhere."
Somebody wake me from this nightmare.
Hello, Provo.
Provo residents who have both dogs and cats as pets are breaking the law - but one Provo family is working to change that. On Dec. 7, Provo City Council members are expected to vote on adding one word to existing city code which allows residents to own up to two dogs or two cats at the same time -- but not a dog and a cat together...
The problem came to Knecht's attention after Susan Sewell, her husband David and their six children, ages 4-19, went to the Utah County Animal Shelter in Spanish Fork to adopt a kitten in August. The family already has a cat and a dog.
They chose a kitten and began filling out the adoption paperwork. But when shelter staff learned of their existing pets, the family was told they could not have the animal because Provo only allowed residents to have cats or dogs, not cats and dogs.
Write your council member today. If we lose this struggle here, we'll take it to the Supreme Court!
Well now, here's one I hadn't thought of before.
A biodegradable mobile phone has been developed by researchers hoping to encourage consumers to recycle. The phone casing contains a sunflower seed which germinates when the handset is buried in compost.
I bet the reception is lousy after it blooms, though.
You get my back, I'll get yours.
With marine mammal rescues you always have to wait a few days at least to see if it was succesful; the disoriented creatures have a puzzling tendency to re-beach themselves. Keep your flippers crossed.
Is this thing on?
Update (11/30, 9:45 am): Well, that was difficult. Long story short, people who unleash comment spam bots ought to have their fingernails ripped out and genitalia electrocuted before they get sent to the Uzbeki prison. At the very least, we should be making liberal use of the piñata method. Anyhow, I'm now running a shiny new MovableType 3.121 installation with MT-Blacklist 2.0, and nothing appears to have vanished into the ether. Whew. Please let me know if you get blocked from commenting when you shouldn't be. I'm still fiddling with the dials over here.
NASA has great images from the Cassini probe of Saturn's moons Titan, Tethys, and Rhea.
I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready...
On Nov. 18 the Little Falls Police Department responded to a call that a large SpongeBob was missing from the top of the Burger King Restaurant. In place of SpongeBob was a ransom note stating in part, "We have SpongeBob. Give us 10 crabby patties, fries and milk shakes," signed Plankton. The note also warned "Patrick is next."
According to members of the Little Falls Police Department, "Plankton always wants the recipe for crabby patties and he is unable to attain it. Patrick is SpongeBob’s sidekick." The investigation continues. Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Burger King’s SpongeBob is asked to contact the Little Falls Police Department at 616-5570.
(via Obscure Store)
Last year I got all heavy with my hopefully-to-be-annual Thanksgiving greeting.
But this year, partly because I have so much for which to be thankful and partly because being thankful this year has proven to be a special challenge at times, I figure I'll be a little lighter. Y'know what I'm thankful for? Turkeys.
Did you know Ben Franklin, my favorite founding father, wanted the eastern wild turkey to be our national symbol? But by the late 19th century the species, Meleagris gallopavo, was hunted so thoroughly and had its habitat destroyed so completely that it almost went extinct. After four failed attempts, largely due to the efforts of early hunting organizations - long the only conservation organizations in the country - by 1970, the species began seriously rebounding and today is one of the best success stories of reintroducing native species to wide swaths of eastern habitat.
The wild turkey is slightly different from the domesticated one (a subspecies), which is descended from smaller stock raised for centuries by Aztec and Maya farmers (and Olmec before them) and then spread across North America via adoption by European settlers. They are gallinaceous (chicken-like) and related to pheasants, grouse, and peacocks.
Turkeys are generalists, and their success and reintroduction has much to do with that flexibility in diet. They eat insects, leaves, grasses, and seeds out of the most marginal habitats. They are big birds, averaging 17 pounds, but can fly up to 55 mph in short bursts and escape predators that way more often than not, although they spend most of the day walking.
A group of turkeys is known as a rafter and the young are called poults. Mating rituals are elaborate and musical. Prancing and fluffing feathers enhance the peculiar calls of both the Toms and Hens.
Snoods, wattles, dewlaps, and caruncles are the folds of blood-engorged skin that hang from the head or neck of the gobbler (another name for tom) in some red, blue, or purple hue and they're adapted to catch the eye of a hormonally heightened hen at breeding time in the Spring. The toms don't take part in childrearing. Hens lay an egg a day for up to 2 weeks then incubate the clutch for about a month. The poults can fly within 3 weeks after hatching.
They are a favorite of hunters, with a bit of a cult following, so-to-speak. Turkey season is generally in October and November (surprise!) but varies by region.
So there's something for which ol' Froz is thankful: a native species that went into decline and has now rebounded because of the actions of those who like to hunt and eat them. I'm thankful for a wild species that had one particularly extinction-avoiding trait: they go well with Zin blends. Yum.
Happy Thanksgiving!
In this correspondence may contain privileged and confidential information...
Alternatively, it may detail our scam to interfere in tribal elections in order to empower individuals who are more likely to contract with our lobbying firm to gain access to Tom DeLay's "network" in Washington, a scam contrived to extract big campaign contributions from casino revenue in exchange for friendly votes on casino-related legislation, allthewhile said tribes being unaware of our duplicitous work on behalf of competing tribal casino operators and, ironically, Ralph Reed to shut them down. Pay no attention to the $66 million.
Reminder to self: emails live forever.
Bill Moyers has more, including a link to the emails as presented as evidence to the Senate Indian Affairs committee. Look 8 paragraphs down; warning: 22MB pdf. But very damning. No wonder Abramoff and Scanlon pleaded the fifth.
Novel legal strategy, but I suspect it will ultimately prove not quite exculpatory.
A man who told sheriff's deputies that a higher power ordered him to grow marijuana is on trial in federal court this week, after Broadwater County deputies discovered more than 700 plants in his home east of Canyon Ferry Reservoir last March. Deputy Mark Weidman said that Mark Culkin - who also goes by the name Helios - said he is on a spiritual mission, part of which involves growing what he calls talma, or marijuana.
"He had two reasons to grow it," Weidman testified in U.S. District Court on Monday. "He was ordered by Lord Malacheck to do it, and it was supposed to help with his microplasma syndrome."
[...]
A search turned up about 780 marijuana plants, including a large grow operation in the crawl space of the home; 138 cacti from which the hallucinogenic drug mescaline can be extracted; a bag of "magic mushrooms"; and three poppy plants from which opium can be harvested. They also found nine plastic tubs filled with dried marijuana, along with numerous pipes, bongs and drug cleaning screens, plus books on growing marijuana, peyote and mushrooms.
[...]
But while Culkin was in the Broadwater County Jail, Weidman said that they discussed some of his "non-traditional beliefs."
"We talked about … things like extraterrestrials, inter-dimensional and that he was the lord of light and a prisoner of war," Weidman said, adding that Culkin seems like "a pretty intelligent man. He talked about being persecuted and prosecuted and that he would do whatever it took to help us figure out what was going on," Weidman said.
Later, Culkin's attorney, Morgan Modine, asked Weidman if Culkin accurately described himself. "I'm not sure if I can even determine what extraterrestrial, inter-dimensional and lord of light is," Weidman replied.
Of course you can't, silly earthling. You have to eat the mushroom first.
(via Obscure Store)
The top left one is real. The other five are not, but they aren't any more far-fetched. See the rest of the collection here.
"When Chairman Mao said ...'The revolution is not a tea party', what he meant was that the revolution was in fact a big dance party. And to commemorate the event and encourage smoking among the masses, he commissioned a special musical cigarette lighter. This sturdy 7.5cmx3.5cm cast iron gas refillable lighter plays a sweet rendition of the Chinese national anthem, that you can tap your feet to while enjoying the last puffs of the revolution."
The longest geographical place name in the United States is Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg in Webster, Massachusetts. 15 Gs! Yes, it's real and Ethel Merman even sang a song about it.
There is even talk here of trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records, but there is no category yet for longest lake name, said Sam Knights, a spokesman for Guinness World Records. There is a longest place name and, alas, it is someplace else. The honor goes to what the Guinness people call the "most scholarly transliteration" of the official name for Bangkok: krungthephphramahanakhon bowonratanakosin mahintharayuthaya mahadilokphiphobnovpharad radchataniburirom udomsantisug.
Say that ten times fast.
Always good to see us mammals sticking together.
A pod of dolphins circled protectively round a group of New Zealand swimmers to fend off an attack by a great white shark, media reported on Tuesday. Lifesavers Rob Howes, his 15-year-old daughter Niccy, Karina Cooper and Helen Slade were swimming 300 feet off Ocean Beach near Whangarei on New Zealand's North Island when the dolphins herded them -- apparently to protect them from a shark.
"They started to herd us up, they pushed all four of us together by doing tight circles around us," Howes told the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA). Howes tried to drift away from the group, but two of the bigger dolphins herded him back just as he spotted a nine-foot great white shark swimming toward the group.
"I just recoiled. It was only about 2 meters away from me, the water was crystal clear and it was as clear as the nose on my face," Howes said, referring to a distance of six feet. "They had corralled us up to protect us," he said.
The lifesavers spent the next 40 minutes surrounded by the dolphins before they could safely swim back to shore.
Way back in 1992, I was at Hilton Head Island, SC and got to go out on a raft among wild dolphins (the program was discontinued shortly afterwards for fear of altering their natural behavior). They would swim right up to the side of the raft, having come to associate it with being fed little fish, and allow you to pet them. In this case, it was a mother and a calf. The first impression I had was, "Holy crap, those things are enormous." The second was that their intelligence was apparent just from looking into their (very human-like) eyes. The experience was powerful and while discontinuing the interactions was obviously the proper course of action, I was still glad to have slid in before the window closed. When I was down there this spring, I had a couple surface and swim by no further than 15 feet from where my brother-in-law and I were standing in neck-deep water. They are magnificent creatures.
In some alternative medicine circles, dolphins are believed to have healing abilities, usually attributed to their ultrasound abilities.
Their powerful sonar can penetrate up to three feet through sand and mud with resolution significant enough to distinguish between a dime and a penny. Due to this power, scientists believe that dolphins can view the inside of our bodies similar to a sonogram performed on pregnant women. Indeed, dolphins are fascinated with pregnant women, honing in on the unborn fetus. Furthermore, they often focus on individuals’ specific areas of impairment, as well as places containing tumors. Many times people who swim with the dolphins can feel himself being scanned. As if bypassing the ears, the sound resonates in the bones, traveling up the spine. [...] Furthermore, the dolphin’s sonar echolocation apparently reduced various tissue restrictions, including adhesions resulting from past surgeries, scarring, or trauma.
International Dolphin Watch has a brief overview of some of the dolphin-assisted therapy currently being explored. However, such therapies with captive dolphins is ethically questionable since, as the late marine biologist Jacques Cousteau noted:
To really understand dolphins, one must study them on their own terms. For them, the sea is a realm whose vast spaces are defined acoustically. Cetaceans communicate over hundreds of miles, making theirs a truly global society. Surrounded by this universal conductor of communication, marine mammals develop unusually strong bonds to one another. Individuals depend heavily on their position within the group, or "pod," for their identity.
Dolphins in tanks are bombarded by a garble of their own vocalizations, which may in fact be acutely painful. Because these are sounds of communication as well as navigation, their world becomes a maze of meaningless reverberations. Their entire societal structure, so crucial for their well-being, is shattered.
Some organizations researching such therapies only use wild dolphins that willingly swim up to take part and, amazingly enough, some dolphins do just that, then swim back out to the ocean. Fascinating...
Because everybody likes to dress up fancy sometimes.
A Serbian tie maker is planning to launch a new range of penis cravats for the man who has everything. Designer Neven Vrgoc said: "The ties are of a special shape and do not go around the neck of the man, but around his member. I hope male customers will buy them to create a good impression on a first date, or women might present them to men when they have been totally satisfied."
Hmm. It's been a while since I've dated, but as I recall, whipping out ones johnson on a first date - even when it's in formal attire - seldom leads to a good impression.
I meant to link to this several days ago, but haven't had much time to do any blogging recently. Anyhow, Mitch Mills mentioned it in the comments to this Unfogged post and I found it one of the most entertaining and eye-opening things I'd read in some time. One man's comparison of living in Piscataway (NJ), Kochi (Japan), and Zhuzhou (China). Enjoy.
The most puzzling difference listed to me was the currency denominations, which I'm sure are indicative of something profound, but I can't begin to guess exactly what that would be.
U.S.
coins: 0.01 0.05 0.10 0.25
bills: 1 5 10 20 100
Japan
coins: 0.01 0.04 0.09 0.45 0.90 4.50
bills 9, 45, 90
China
coins: 0.01 0.06 0.12
bills: 0.01 0.06 0.12 0.24 0.60 1.20 2.40, 6, 12
Update (8:00 pm): Absentmindedness über alles. Ben Wolfson, not Mitch Mills, provided the link and there's nothing weird about the currency, it's just converted to dollar equivalents. I can't tell you how disappointing that is. Where'd I put my teeth?
Via Political Wire, here's some mighty disheartening news about the state of modern America. A just-released Gallup poll found:
Only about a third of Americans believe that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific theory that has been well supported by the evidence, while just as many say that it is just one of many theories and has not been supported by the evidence. The rest say they don't know enough to say. Forty-five percent of Americans also believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago. A third of Americans are biblical literalists who believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.
What can you even say about this? I know we are supposed to be reaching out and trying to find common ground with our conservative countrymen, but those three statements above... I give up. Anybody over the age of 12 who still believes that stuff in 2004 is simply too divorced from reality to be reached. Just not worth the effort. I wish I could be delicate and polite about this, but you know, I just can't. If you believe Darwin is unsupported by the facts, then you haven't bothered to look at the facts. Ever. Your silverware options should be restricted to plastic sporks so you don't injure yourself.
I return to my original thesis of a couple weeks ago. We should be striving to make such beliefs the hallmark of the Republican Party. Just like Elizabeth Bumiller pestering Kerry with the meaningless "Are you a liberal?" question during the primary debate, GOP officeholders should be forced to publicly defend or deny those positions every time a Q&A session gets underway.
"Senator McCain, do you believe that Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection is unsupported by the facts?"
"Vice President Cheney, do you believe that the entire fossil record is a hoax and that humans were created 10,000 years ago?"
"President Bush, do you believe that sex in a 2nd marriage is, in all cases, adultery?" (Mark 10:9)
How a country with this much wealth, media access, and free public education ends up with huge swaths of the population holding beliefs that were ripped straight from the Dark Ages is a mystery I may never resolve. Here's the framing, folks: Democrats are the party of science and education; Republicans are the party of religious extremism. Most Christians I know are completely rational, intelligent, and aghast at the anti-intellectualism of their fundamentalist brethren. They may share some iconography but they ascribe to two totally dissimilar religions. The GOP should have a price to pay for feeding this constituency.
And if you work in any area of scientific research (except, I guess, in the fields of weapons development or fossil fuel extraction) and still voted for this ticket despite their stunning record of hostility toward science, you should be ashamed. You knew better.
To the "let's destroy the heathenistic, communististic public schools conference" this weekend in Washington?
Take a brief (trust me, keep it brief) tour around the website of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State. Feel your skin crawl, shudder at their recent empowerment, and leave quickly, I advise.
My favorite bit, mindful of the educational value of constructive engagement with people holding differing opinions from your own, from their FAQ, is here.
I weep.
The human and the hare. Fascinating stuff.
"We think running is one of the most transforming events in human history," Bramble added. "We are arguing the emergence of humans is tied to the evolution of running." The conventional theory is that our distinctive body form derives from an improved walking ability in early hominids, and that running was simply a byproduct of this earlier adaptation. Also, humans are considered unaccomplished runners when compared to mammals such as pronghorn antelopes, which can sprint at 40 miles an hour (60 kilometers an hour) for several minutes.
But Bramble says human running ability is often underestimated. "What's important is combining reasonable speed with exceptional endurance," he said. The study notes that athletic humans can outrun horses and antelopes over extremely long distances. In parts of Africa this technique is still used today by hunters to exhaust their prey. Bramble adds that walking cannot explain the changes in body form that distinguish humans from Australopithecus.
Interesting hypothesis that has been widely circulated in the news the last couple of days. It's well worth the read. I can only chuckle at the irony that our species may have obtained our dominance on the planet in part because of our endurance, or ability to be patient and persistent and think long-term, yet now our civilization seems perilously obsessed with immediate self-gratification.
Swiss teenagers smoke more cannabis than their peers in every other European country, a survey said Thursday, casting a pall over the country's prim and wholesome image. One in three Swiss 15-year-olds has lit up a joint within the past year, while the number of teenagers regularly smoking or getting drunk rose 10 percent between 1998 and 2002, the Swiss Institute for the Prevention of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse said in their survey. [...]
Britain and Spain trailed Switzerland as the top cannabis consumers, while British and Scandinavian teenagers stood out for "drinking in order to get drunk," the survey of children aged 11-15 in more than 30 European countries showed. Dispelling the image of the Netherlands as a haven of hash-lovers, young people in this country showed only an average level of cannabis use.
I wondered why my Swiss Army Knife included a hemostat.
Dreamworks' film Shark Tale is trying to turn your kids queer. But don't you worry, cruel.com assures us that the American Family Association is on the case.
It is when Shark Tale turns its attention to Lenny that it veers toward an undercurrent of approval for homosexuality. While it is difficult to prove intent when a film does not explicitly make a character "gay," the story and dialogue demonstrate an implicit approval of homosexuality. The movie is, as Peter Debruge of Premiere magazine said in a review, "a weak allegory about a macho dad learning to accept his gay son."
In developing this allegory, Shark Tale uses all of the familiar Hollywood plot devices, beginning with the son who is "different," and who fails to measure up to the cultural standards of manhood. Lenny's mannerisms and voice tend toward the effeminate, notes a review by Scott Tobias in The Onion A.V. Club, but that's not the worst of it. For in sharkdom, masculinity is measured by one's proficiency as a meat-eater.
The kid is a vegetarian who likes to dress up as a dolphin. Uh oh. Priscilla, Queen of the Deep. Leather pants are one thing, but no son of mine is going to be sporting a blowhole, I'll tell you that right now. Note the irony that "eating meat" is the sign of good healthy heterosexuality.
A Bulgarian farmer has gone to court to demand substantial damages after claiming the prize-winning pedigree pig he bought from a breeder was a homosexual. Farmer Galen Dobrev, 43, from Shumen in Bulgaria told the court: "It's a disgrace, all he was interested in was other male pigs." The farmer took pictures of the gay pig to prove the 220-pound boar was homosexual and had fellow farmers testify on his behalf as to the pig's sexual preferences.
He told the court that when his fellow farmers heard about the gay pig it had also been impossible to sell him - and in the end he had turned the animal into sausages. But the breeder who sold the pig claimed that the farmer had acted too soon by making pork sausages, and said that if he had waited until the pig was sexually mature he would have found it performed perfectly normally.
Mabel, these sausages have a queer taste to them. Best sentence to take out of context: "The farmer [...] had fellow farmers testify on his behalf as to the pig's sexual preferences."
Hundreds of people have been injured in an annual stone throwing festival at a remote mountain village in northern India. Residents of Dhami near Shimla divided themselves into two groups and pelted stones at each other. The group having the least number of wounded were declared winners reports Asian News International.
It is reported participants were extremely enthusiastic about the stone throwing ritual, which continued for more than an hour in spite of injuries sustained. Local administrators and police set up several makeshift medical camps to treat the bleeding victims. Those severely wounded were taken to hospitals at Shimla for treatment.
The Stranger has an interesting (and a bit pissed off) editorial recommending the strategy for the Democratic Party: become the urbanist party. Lay out some solid strategies for urban renewal and livability, like affordable housing and transit, focus on municipal government, and grow the cities. The 2004 results are clear: it's Metropolis against Ruralia, and it's very nearly tied.
If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents. John Kerry won among the highly educated, Jews, young people, gays and lesbians, and non-whites. What do all these groups have in common? They choose to live in cities. An overwhelming majority of the American popuation chooses to live in cities. And John Kerry won every city with a population above 500,000. He took half the cities with populations between 50,000 and 500,000. The future success of liberalism is tied to winning the cities. An urbanist agenda may not be a recipe for winning the next presidential election--but it may win the Democrats the presidential election in 2012 and create a new Democratic majority.
[...]
We won't concern ourselves if red states restrict choice. We'll just make sure that abortion remains safe and legal in the cities where we live, and the states we control, and when your daughter or sister or mother dies in a botched abortion, we'll try not to feel too awful about it.
In short, we're through with you people. We're going to demand that the Democrats focus on building their party in the cities while at the same time advancing a smart urban-growth agenda that builds the cities themselves. The more attractive we make the cities--politically, aesthetically, socially--the more residents and voters cities will attract, gradually increasing the electoral clout of liberals and progressives. For Democrats, party building and city building is the same thing. We will strive to turn red states blue one city at a time.
The piece is long and I had trouble not quoting huge passages of it, so it's very much worth your time to read the whole thing.
Technological achievements come in many sizes. They also come at different velocities: some really fast, but for some you have to wait a while.
Makes me want to spend some time thinking about time.
"We like to say that the big bang is nothing special in the history of our universe," said Sean Carroll, an Assistant Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago.
Yeah, I like to say that, too. But what do I know?
This is gonna hurt me worse than it hurts you.
Matanuska [Alaska] Christian School's principal has been fired and a teacher has quit over a disciplinary incident in which the principal had himself whipped in front of two students. Principal Steve Unfreid, who said he was inspired in his choice of disciplinary tactics by the actions of Jesus, asked teacher Joe Brost to whip him in front of two male students in the school's basement last month after the boys were caught kissing girls in the locker room for the second time in a week.
[...]
When the two seniors, 17 and 18, got caught kissing girls in front of younger students in late October, Unfreid said that while contemplating what discipline to hand out, he woke at 3 a.m. and prayed how to avoid expelling them. He said that was when he remembered years ago he had cured his son of chronic lying by telling his son to hit him with a wooden ladle instead of spanking the youngster.
Later at school, Unfreid walked the boys down to a basement room with Brost. He told them, " 'Guys, this has gotta stop,' " he said. " 'I've let the atmosphere get too lax. I share in this discipline. This is a one-time deal.' " Then the principal took off his belt, gave it to Brost, and instructed the teacher to "discipline me like you would discipline your own son," he recalled. He told the teacher to stop only when the students acknowledged their mistake. The whole thing, starting with the trip downstairs, lasted 5 to 10 minutes, he said.
Wow.
It has finally happened. Chemical weapons in the hands of a religious fundamentalist are being used in Iraq. Unfortunately, he's one of ours.
Providing a fuller, more revealing quote from Lt. Col. Brandl, the Sunday Times of London included a lead-in sentence: "The Marines that I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a faceless enemy. But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan... In other words, Satan started this conflict. And we -- the anti-Satan forces -- fully intend to finish it by destroying him."
[...]
During a real holy war, of course, the fire and brimstone is not just figurative. Dominating the top half of the New York Times front page on Nov. 10 was a full-color picture with stunning hues and brilliant composition, over this caption: "Marines tried to take cover after a phosphorous round, set off to help provide cover for tanks, rained down on the unit. No one was seriously hurt." An article inside mentioned that the phosphorous broke "into a hundred flaming pieces ... burning backpacks and gear but seriously hurting no one." Reassuring.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post article provided more graphic -- though sketchy -- information about phosphorous. "Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water," the Post explained more than 20 paragraphs into the story. "Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns." The Post quoted hospital physician Kamal Hadeethi: "The corpses of the mujaheddin which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."
But such melting of human flesh is an abstraction in U.S. media, as it is apt to be for holy warriors. On NBC’s "Today" show Nov. 9, a network correspondent in Baghdad mentioned phosphorous shells just long enough to say that they are "meant to burn through metal bunkers." Presumably a description of effects on human beings would not have gone well with viewers breakfasts.
A live report from a CNN correspondent in Fallujah, on Nov. 8, was similarly circumspect: "Tanks have been blasting away inside the city, and shells filled with phosphorous -- shells to hide the movement of the Marines inside the city -- have been exploding overhead."
Via Lenin's Tomb, who notes that the use of white phosphorus "violates the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, for those who think it matters." I await the principled denunciations from the hawks who endlessly flogged the fifteen-year-old chemical attacks on Halabja.
Whaddayknow? The Poor Man and I share the very same FAVORITE THING EVER: "getting pious lectures from devout Christians who haven't even bothered to read the Cliff Notes to the Bible. And it happens constantly."
Oh god, does it ever. And if you ever needed an excuse to read the Bible, this is it: eventually, you will make a hollering thumper's head explode when you drive the lane and throw down thundering scriptural dunk after thundering scriptural dunk. Spectators will actually applaud. You'll feel like Ali taunting Ernie Terrell. "What's my name?" Okay, before you read any further, go read the post and the comments too, because taken together, they are the funniest thing you'll read for weeks - especially when the Lord sayeth "it's your chance to do the dance they call the Hump." All the prophets in the top ten, please allow me to bump thee.
Speaking as a long-backslid Baptist who spent many childhood Sundays doing Bible drills, let me make this perfectly clear: if you can't even get the scriptural references right when you're lecturing me about my need to live more biblically, I will follow you all the way home mocking you at the top of my lungs.
Jack Louis, Froz's second buck private in the little liberal army we're breeding, is rumbling along toward two months old (ahem... pictures, yo). Noah Joseph, my second, has two months to go. That's me and my two boys in North Carolina, Froz and his two boys in California.
Surrender, Middle America. We've got you surrounded.
Ananova: "German customs officers have seized Saddam Hussein's left leg."
Ananova: "The Duchess of Northumberland has won permission to grow cannabis, opium, magic mushrooms and cocaine."
I guess it's still a net gain, though not by much.
President Bush has chosen White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, a Texas confidant and one of the most prominent Hispanics in the administration, to succeed Attorney General John Ashcroft, sources close to the White House said today. [...] Gonzales has been at the center of developing Bush's positions on balancing civil liberties with waging the war on terrorism -- opening the White House counsel to the same line of criticism that has dogged Ashcroft. For instance, Gonzales publicly defended the administration's policy -- essentially repudiated by the Supreme Court and now being fought out in the lower courts -- of detaining certain terrorism suspects for extended periods without access to lawyers or courts. He also wrote a controversial February 2002 memo in which Bush claimed the right to waive anti-torture law and international treaties providing protections to prisoners of war. That position drew fire from human rights groups, which said it helped led to the type of abuses uncovered in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Human women are less promiscuous than chimps but more promiscuous than gorillas. How do we know? By the size of our testicles.
Update (12:11 pm): In a loosely related story...
Yes, I'm going to flog this horse 'til you're sick to death of reading about it. For another example of the reaching-across-the-aisle tolerance of conservatives, go watch this video: I Am a Liberal (found via Matt Welch). Hey, if that's the game you want to play, then let's get to it.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
I am a conservative.
By the way, this guy, this guy, and this guy were all liberals.
See what a stupid game this is? Here's the truth of the matter: the fight in this country isn't between left and right, two labels that couldn't fit more poorly to 21st century American politics. The division is between normalcy and extremism. The Republican Party, once a proud redoubt of free thinking and principled stands, now teeters on the edge of being dominated by its extremist elements.
Despite how that sounds, it isn't a masturbation euphemism. Ergo, the entirely work-safe video can be viewed here.
To be the pinnacle of American newspaper journalism, the New York Times has undergone a decline in quality so steep as to take ones breath away. But for all the snowballing awfulness of the reporting, it simply can't compete with the 9.8 meters per second per second decline in the quality of the editorial pages. Truly breathtaking vapidity, and more of it with each day's drying ink. The sole remaining beacon of reason in the Old Grey Lady's pages? Bob Herbert, baby.
A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.
This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.
[...]
You have to be careful when you toss the word values around. All values are not created equal. Some Democrats are casting covetous eyes on voters whose values, in many cases, are frankly repellent.
Nailhead. Hammer. Pow.
Update (2:57 pm): As Mitch points out in the comments, they also have Paul Krugman, so, y'know, two ponies.
I have been living in Provo for about four years and I was just barely introduced to one of Provo's finest characters. A friend of mine told me about this man and where he could be found. I call him "Middle Finger Man" (MFM) because no one knows his real name. These man sits on his porch all day every day and flips off everyone that drives by and has been doing this for years. He is so reliable to be there that you can actually give directions according to this man as a landmark. "Yeah, head up Geneva and then when you see middle finger man, then I am the second turn after him....etc."
When I heard about this guy, I just couldn't believe it. I thought that would have to be the funniest thing that I have seen for a while. So I hopped on my motorcycle and headed over to Geneva Road. I drove over the bridge that spans the Provo River and counted the houses, "One House, two houses, three houses." I didn't see him at first and thought that I would go home without seeing him then BAM! There he was on his porch and AS SOON as I caught eyes with him, both fingers went flying up and stayed there til I was out of sight. I couldn't believe it. I quickly turned around to try it again. Same thing happened. So I tried it six more times (8 total) and just chuckled each time. [...]
The next day my buddy Dave and I headed over to MFM's house again with my video camera. What I decided to do was just to pull off in front of his house and challenge him to a battle. I would hold the camera on him and he would hold his fingers toward me. I'm not sure what would happen, but I knew it would be fun.
The video is priceless.
(via Zudfunck)
Y'know, these guys are starting to convince me that perhaps evolution is all bunk, because I'm having trouble believing that these folks have evolved at all.
A suburban American school board found itself in court yesterday after it tried to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by placing a sticker on its science textbooks saying evolution was "a theory, not a fact". Atlanta's Cobb County school board, the second largest board in Georgia, added the sticker two years ago after a 2,300 strong petition attacked the presentation of "Darwinism unchallenged". Some parents wanted creationism - the theory that God created humans according to the Bible version - to be taught alongside evolution. [...]
Marjorie Rogers, a parent who does not believe in evolution, protested and petitioned the board to add a sticker and an insert setting out other explanations for the origins of life. "It is unconstitutional to teach only evolution," she said. "The school board must allow the teaching of both theories of origin." Her efforts galvanised the fundamentalist community.
"God created earth and man in his image," another parent, Patricia Fuller, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Leave this garbage out of the textbooks. I don't want anybody taking care of me in a nursing home some day to think I came from a monkey."
This year Georgia's schools superintendent, Kathy Cox, removed the word "evolution" from the state's science teaching standards, but she quickly backtracked after receiving nearly 1,000 complaints. In 1987, the supreme court ruled that creationism was a religious belief that could not be taught in public schools along with evolution.
By the way, that superintendent ought to be driven out of public education - teaching "intelligent" design is one thing, removing the word evolution altogether is lawsuit-worthy professional malpractice. Here's what the stickers said: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered." Can we also stipulate that gravity is only a theory, not a fact, and it's possible that we don't fly off into space due to the Earth's Property of Universal Stickiness? This is just completely nuts.
I'll be willing to compromise on this one: the public schools will teach your Flat Earth nonsense, but you are required to teach evolution in your Sunday schools and affix a sticker to your Bibles declaring that the creation story is just an allegory, not a fact, and that the Bible should be approached with an open mind. What? That's unacceptable, you say? Then go back to burning your heretics and leave alone those of us who believe the Enlightenment actually happened. 300 years ago. Note: this story isn't taking place in East Ruralia, Oklahoma, but in a fricking Atlanta suburb. Atlanta!
I think if we would all just follow four basic principles, we will muddle through as a nation okay, no matter what happens. The Apostrophic Principles of Societal Survival are: don't give matches to pyromaniacs, don't give your car keys to drunks, don't give hand grenades to retards, and don't let religious fundamentalists anywhere near the levers of government. Best I can tell, Tuesday's election violated all four principles simultaneously.
Update (11:08 am): Via Miniver Cheevy, the best way to handle to handle these folks when they start preaching to you on the subway. Heh heh.
After Jones Soda Company's smashing success with the Turkey and Gravy Soda last year (oh, you'd like to think I'm just making that up, but I am so not making that up), you knew it was a lock that it would roll back into stores this fall. But in case you aren't restricted to the Atkins-friendly meat-only sodas, they now have your entire Thanksgiving meal in carbonated form.
I know the picture is too small to read the labels, but you can click it for a larger version to confirm that Jones Soda's Holiday Pack includes the following flavors: Turkey & Gravy Soda, Cranberry Soda, Mashed Potato & Butter, Green Bean Casserole, and Fruitcake Soda. I shit you not. I think I just threw up in my mouth.
Well, I'm just having me a grand old time reading all the tut-tutting from the right about how liberals look down on their fellow Americans and how our enduring nastiness and intolerance of conservatives is what keeps us from winning elections and so on and so forth. I supposed they might have a point, so I went back to check the right wing's record of bipartisan we're-all-in-this-togetherness, as reflected by some of their better selling books that were published during the long, polite campaign:
Ann Coulter
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)
Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right
Sean Hannity
Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism
Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism
David Horowitz
Hating Whitey: and Other Progressive Causes
The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future
David Limbaugh
Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity
Absolute Power: The Legacy of Corruption in the Clinton-Reno Justice Department
Mona Charen
Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First
Do-gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim To Help And The Rest Of Us
Michael Savage
The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Schools, Faith, and Military
John O'Neill
Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry
Dick Morris
Off with Their Heads : Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Business
Neal Boortz
The Terrible Truth about Liberals
Carl Limbacher
Hillary's Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House
Robert Patterson
Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our Security
Laura Ingraham
Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN are Subverting America
Ben Shapiro
Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth
Bernard Goldberg
Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite
Dan Flynn
Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness
Barbara Olsen
The Final Days: A Behind the Scenes Look at the Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House
Al Snow
Liberal-itis: A Thinking Disorder Destroying America
Tammy Bruce
The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values
Hugh Hewitt
If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It
Hmm. Well, in that spirit of bonhomie and civic highmindedness, I'd like to invite any of my conservative friends delivering lectures about the lack of liberal civility to kiss my hairy red ass. And I mean that in the very nicest, nonpartisan way.
